AWS Summit Amsterdam 2019

Author : Simtech Consulting

There is great interest in all the innovations Amazon brings to the table, as evidenced by the long queues at registration (which were quickly handled in a professional manner).

We attended a very interesting keynote with some nice insights on the Machine Learning possibilities used at Talpa and many inspiring talks on topics such as hybrid cloud, serverless, AI/ML, CI/CD, and IoT.

Companies are worried about being disrupted in this age of digital transformation, with only 8% confident in their current business model. To solve this, Amazon is pushing for a serverless-first approach, coupled with infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD pipelines, and an integrated approach to security.

We are happy to see Amazon acknowledging the need for hybrid cloud, with services such as Direct Connect to link on-premises environments with AWS, Snowball Edge to run compute in locations with limited or no connectivity, and VMWare Cloud on AWS to help with DC migration, DR capabilities, CAPEX reduction, and moving Enterprise Apps to the cloud in a lift-and-shift manner. The most interesting service, in our opinion, is AWS Outposts, Amazon's response to Microsoft's Azure Stack and Google's Anthos. Outposts allows you to run EC2 instances on-premises with plans to add AWS services like RDS, ECS and EKS after launch.

Managing your networks in a multi-VPC setup is going to get a lot easier with the Transit Gateway, which will replace complex VPC peering connections with a central overview where you can manage inter VPC/VPN routing and network ACLs. Direct Connect integration is coming up soon.

Amazon recommends using managed services that allow you to focus on writing your business logic instead of maintaining infrastructure. We share their opinion, which is why we recently launched DBaaS Private Cloud, a unique, fully integrated platform that combines IaaS, Automatic Database Provisioning, and License Compliance Management. We also plan on adding more managed services to our portfolio soon, so stay tuned!

All in all, we were very happy to be part of this event where we were able to meet and share insights with many like-minded, innovation-focused people.